Feature Articles

Editing LaTeX with Aquamacs

Most old-school Mac users would never think of using
something for their LaTeX editing needs that brings up so many
images of command-line hacking as Emacs does. In my personal
opinion however, Emacs (with the help of the AUCTeX, preview-latex
and
flyspell extensions) is one of the most advanced LaTeX editing environments
available for the Mac. This is especially true for some of the
open source projects such as Aquamacs that try to integrate Emacs
more into the Mac operating system.

As a picture says more than a thousand words, this page
collects screenshots showcasing some of the advanced LaTeX
editing features I miss in other OS X offerings.

Aquamacs offers a tight integration with Mac
OS X

Many potential Emacs users might be scared away by the
seemingly complex keyboard shortcuts. The Aquamacs Emacs distribution however
implements the standard OS X keyboard shortcuts and other
interface conventions, integrating Emacs
into the Aqua environment. Installation is also a breeze as the
entire distribution comes in a single-click installer
package.

You can continue using the keyboard shortcuts for
copy-pasting you're accustomed to.
The file menu even has a recent items entry.

And the Aquamacs menu icon is of course blessed with a more
Mac-like look.

AUCTeX is already included

Advanced syntax coloring

This screenshot shows the default syntax coloring applied to
LaTeX documents. Note that the coloring goes beyond simply
highlighting a predefined set of LaTeX commands. The argument
of the \emph command is for instance set in italics.
Also, the font size and weight of subsections varies according
to their nesting.

While you're typing, paren matching will help you close all
kinds of parens and brances correctly.

Text in a verbatim environment and arguments of the
verb command are typeset in a typewriter font.

LaTeX-aware spell checking

On-the-fly spell checking is available as you type. The
spell checker is LaTeX-aware: it ignores the spelling of LaTeX
commands, but will check arguments that are supposed to contain
text. For instance, it will not mark the error in
\documentclass[a4paper]{articlle}, but it will
underline both errors in \section[Short tiitle]{Longer
tiiitle}.
Note that some words are underlined in orange instead of red.
These words are available in the British English dictionary,
but not in the current one that is set to American
English.

Navigate through LaTeX errors

Inline preview of LaTeX formulas and
images

My favourite feature is the inline preview of LaTeX formulas
and images. It takes a while to generate all the previews for a
large document, but the authors were kind enough to display
these little work-in-progress triangles to keep you
entertained.

You can continue editing your document as usual. The
previews for formulas and images will move along with the other
text. This feature truly makes editing complicated documents a
breeze.

For quick feedback about any change you made, you can easily
toggle between the inline preview and the LaTeX code of an
image or formula.